


The World Spins; We Stumble On

by thedevilchicken



Category: Man of Steel (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5512220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven weeks turned into eight then three months then four then twelve. Time passed. The city slowly rebuilt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Spins; We Stumble On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [polka_dot_yam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/polka_dot_yam/gifts).



In the start, it seemed simple. 

In the start, Clark thought he’d move to Metropolis, find a job and live his life. In the start, he thought he’d make an honest living day by day and maybe try to help as best he could. It was a pretty simple goal when it came down to it, simple enough for a rural Kansas farmboy moving out into the big, bad city. It was maybe _too_ simple for a son of the House of El, whatever that really meant. 

In the start, when he moved, it still seemed simple enough. He rented a place in a decent enough neighborhood, spent a couple of days moving in with a little help from his mom. He’d miss her, he thought, as she made sure his kitchen was stocked before she hugged him and hugged him and smiled and cried and laughed then left. He’d miss her though Metropolis wasn’t that far from Smallville really, a few hours in the truck but he didn’t need the truck. He could hop up off of the top of his building and touch down outside his mom’s back door in a couple of minutes and he did that every night for the first week, telling himself it was for his mom more than it was for him, but she’d already been alone in the house for years by then. He regretted that. He regretted a lot of things. 

It seemed simple. Seeing Lois in the office almost every day seemed simple, too, till they went out to lunch one day to go through a story she was writing and when she took him down the street and around the corner in her impossibly high heels, he realised. Her favorite café was still closed for reconstruction and _nothing_ was simple. It had been seven weeks and the rebuild had gotten almost nowhere. And _he_ was the one who’d caused it all. 

“Clark, it’s not your fault,” Lois said, shaking her head at him. Sometimes he thought she was the one with the superpowers, the way she read his mind, but he guessed that was just what you had to expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Especially one who’d sniffed out his secret like a red-headed bloodhound. 

“Then whose fault is it, Lois?” he asked. “Don’t tell me Zod. He was doing what he was _born_ for.”

Lois looked at him sharply. “And you’re not?” she asked. 

He didn’t know how to tell her what he’d been born for, so he sighed and looked away. She clapped him on the back, apparently taking that as an admission of defeat so maybe she wasn’t so superpowered after all. 

“We’ll grab a hotdog and eat in the park,” she said. So he went with her. And all the way he tried not to notice that the city was in ruins all around them, and tried not to think how he’d blocked that out before. 

Seven weeks turned into eight then three months then four then twelve. Time passed. The city slowly rebuilt. 

Clark helped. He helped Clark Kent, volunteering, helping out with a homeless shelter every Tuesday night because the Kryptonian destruction hadn’t only affected business. He handed out flyers for fundraisers, organised a half-marathon for the charity, shook hands with the mayor of Metropolis and the district attorney, the chief of police and a parade of big name local businessmen. Lois said it was his Kansas charm that got them opening up their pocketbooks and signing their names to checks, but Clark suspected Lois’s city wit and her plunging neckline didn’t hurt their case. He didn’t say so but the smile she gave him, on the steps of the City Hall after their third benefit that year, said she knew exactly what he was thinking. She didn’t seem to mind. 

Clark helped. He helped as Superman because that was what the newspapers called him, like maybe it was what the S on his chest stood for. He cleared rubble from the streets in the start, worked with the demolition teams to speed up the process and weathered their good-natured jokes about him wrecking the place even worse, then he made a couple of public appearances, Clark Kent and his tuxedo disappearing stage right though no one ever noticed that when Superman stepped into the room. He shook the hands of all the men and women Clark Kent had just greeted himself, saw how their expressions differed, how their posture straightened, how their pulses all kicked up a gear. He could see their hearts beating in their chests. Maybe Lois’s strategic neckline wasn’t the only way into their wallets. 

He could see the way Lois’s heart beat, too, even if he tried not to look. It was like she knew when he did it, every time, and she’d smile and flick her hair over her shoulder and he’d try to concentrate on Bruce Wayne or Lex Luthor while his head would full of Lois Lane. Then Superman would leave and Clark Kent would reappear and he’d fade back into relative invisibility. He didn’t mind that the rich and the famous ignored him because Lois looked at him the same way whichever suit he wore. 

Sometimes, he went back to Smallville. Sometimes he’d go as Superman in the suit that still felt strange to him in a lot of ways, smile and wave and put the country’s eye on the small American town where aliens had landed. Sometimes, he’d go as Clark and get more work done acting like a regular guy than he did as the guy who could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Sometimes, Lois went with him; she won awards for her story on how Smallville had reacted, regrouped and then started to rebuild. She painted them like every town, like just around the corner, _it could happen to you_ , but Clark knew she knew Smallville wasn’t just any town or every town to him. She made Smallville and Superman into a shining beacon of hope because even if they weren’t alone then whatever came next, they’d be protected, they’d rebuild. He hoped she was right. 

Sometimes, when they were there together, they’d visit Clark’s mom on the farm. They’d find she’d made cookies for a school bake sale that she’d only pretend to scold them for stealing fresh from the oven, then she’d bring them a pitcher of lemonade that they’d all three drink on the porch before dinner. Then Lois would help her cook and Clark would drive in new fence posts or mend the old shed roof while he waited and pretend he couldn’t hear them talking about him, in the kitchen of the house where he’d grown up in a country on a world where he hadn’t been born. 

“I wish you could have met Clark’s father, Lois,” he heard his mom say one warm August evening as she served the peas. “I think you would have liked him. There’s so much of Jonathan in Clark.”

He didn’t say Jonathan Kent wasn’t his father. He didn’t say he’d always wished he was. And Lois, to her credit, didn’t tell his mom she’d met Clark’s _real_ father, or his _biological_ father because Jor-El was just as new to him as Krypton was, or something like him. Clark couldn’t talk about either of them, not then.

A year turned to two. Lois was still the one who won the awards but Clark was pretty well respected in the field and he had the desk across from hers at the Planet, listened to her forming crazy plans for her next crazy story and knew he loved her for it, every baffling second of it. They dated on and off, between stories, when it fit, when he wasn't saving the world though he always scowled when she put it to him in those terms. Sometimes he'd get home late or early and she'd be waiting with a smile that he couldn't not return. She wore hiking boots and flak jackets just as easily as heels and Chanel dresses and while he knew she’d always do what it took to get the next big scoop, the only person he’d ever known with anything close to the courage of her convictions, to her personal integrity, was his dad back home in Smallville, six feet under the ground. 

Sometimes, Lois would kiss him on the cheek in the office when a big story finally went to press. Sometimes, she’d kiss him on the mouth with her arms looped up around his neck, but that was mostly when he’d saved her life, time after time after time. And then, they went out to Smallville in Clark’s beat-up truck, Lois laughing at the way they bounced on the over-stiff suspension over every pothole along the way. They went to the reopening of the Smallville town hall, stood by and saw the mayor cut the ribbon as Lois’s fingers wove with his, and then they snuck away to his mom’s farm. Lois stepped in close to him as he sat there in a big old chair on the porch and she kissed his forehead, her fingertips at the nape of his neck. 

“I bet your father would be proud, Clark,” she said, and he knew what she meant because he’d made it happen. _He_ was the one who’d pushed them to rebuild, then one of many whose hard work had made it possible. Smallville had no more scars, at least none that were visible; Metropolis would take a while longer, but he’d make sure that they got there and maybe get there himself along with it. Maybe one day he’d figure out if he was really Clark Kent or Kal-El, or both, or neither. Maybe one day he’d give away the guilt he felt, or maybe he’d find the guilt was what made him who he was, and made him strong. Maybe he’d make amends. Maybe he’d realize he didn’t need to.

Clark settled his hands at Lois’s waist, and she let him. He stood and he brushed back her hair from her face, and she let him. He leaned down to press his lips to hers, and she let him. She kissed him back. He could hear her heart racing. He could see it in her chest, the most perfect sight in the world. She made him feel human when he was anything but. He’d saved her life a hundred times, but she’d saved his first. 

And in the end, he didn’t ask her which father she meant. The way Lois looked at him that night under the bright Kansas stars, he thought maybe they’d both have been proud.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a quote from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann - "The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough."


End file.
